Cover Story: Is there a white conspiracy to keep power out of the hands of Atlanta blacks?

They might as well have painted a double line in the middle of Ponce de Leon and made it official, a white line on the north side and a black line on the south. ?
-- Tom Wolfe, from A Man in Full

Before former DeKalb County Sheriff Sidney Dorsey left office in late December, he fired a few parting shots.
His failed try at another term, he said, could be blamed not on rumors of misconduct in office but on the concerted efforts of a white, northside business cartel and the news media it feeds.
In assessing blame for his own political misfortunes, Atlanta’s mayor, Bill Campbell, has leveled similar invective at opponents of the city’s affirmative action program, as well as at reporters, political adversaries and his critics in the business community. Campbell called federal investigators looking into alleged corruption at City Hall “forces of evil.”
“The FBI has never been a friend of the African-American community, and they’re not a friend now,” Campbell said on a black-oriented radio station.
The collective reaction of white people to race-bias allegations in the “city too busy to hate” is likely an eye-rolling “there he goes again.” Detractors claim playing the race card is a simple way to deflect attention and mobilize a political base around an easily definable issue.
But if the tactic is that simple and explained away so easily, why does it work?
What if Campbell, Dorsey and others who level the charge of racially motivated politics, unfair treatment and biased media coverage really believe they are victims?
And what if they’re right?
White conspiracy or race card?
In 1996, a Clark Atlanta University survey of 1,112 black Atlanta residents found that 65 percent believed a few big interests run the city. Fifty-nine percent believed the white power structure prevents elected blacks from helping the black community — though nearly an identical number said they felt black elected officials were willing to be co-opted.
Steven Muhammad, the southern regional director for the Million Family March, puts it more simply: “The general perception is that the white business community is engaged in a conspiracy against the black community.”
Just look at the heads of all the major companies in Atlanta — they’re white, says Rodney Williams over lunch at Mammy’s Kitchen on Memorial Drive.
You just expect some political tit-for-tat, says fellow diner Otis Petties, and white businesses have the money.
Most recently, underlying fears of a white conspiracy have found voice in complaints over gentrification — the process in which upper-class homeowners buy up property in traditionally lower- or middle- class neighborhoods, which drives up rent and forces out longtime residents.
State Rep. Billy McKinney of Atlanta has called gentrification “just a nice word for taking black folks’ property.” Kandi Thomas, who was forced to leave the McLendon Gardens apartment complex in Lake Claire to make room for new townhomes, told CL in November that gentrification is “a conspiracy going around to get all the black people out of the city, with all these lofts and new homes going up everywhere for white people. It’s an effort to try to change the racial composition of the city.”
Even Cynthia Tucker, the Atlanta Constitution’s editorial page editor and a vocal critic of the mayor, admitted in a Sept. 24 column that Atlanta’s black political leaders have plenty of available capital when they want to talk about how they’re being treated unfairly because of race — whether they truly believe it or not. She noted that, according to the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, “70 congressmen have faced criminal charges during the past 25 years, and 15 percent of them are minorities — or four times their percentage in Congress.”
Muhammad cites the 1995 case of Mel Reynolds, a black congressman from Illinois, who received five years in prison for having sex with a 16-year-old girl. White congressional contemporaries received virtual slaps on the wrist for similar offenses.
The examples aren’t just political. Black residents living in large swaths of south Atlanta need only open their eyes to see what the author Tom Wolfe described in A Man in Full as the “glossy pomposity of the center of the world” — the city’s northside and downtown — and higher crime and fewer amenities in their own backyards.
Then, there’s Coca-Cola’s recent mega-settlement of a discrimination lawsuit, similar lawsuits filed against Georgia Power and Home Depot, a 6 percent student population for blacks at the University of Georgia, and chronic allegations of racial profiling by police.
“There’s a level of frustration in the black community that white people can barely comprehend. It’s not hard to tap into that resentment,” says Rick Allen, a local political commentator and author of Atlanta Rising, which centers on Atlanta’s history between 1946 and 1996.
A foundation of mistrust
In a city now known as a mecca for black artists, politicians and business leaders, it’s easy to forget that Atlanta is only 40 years removed from separate restrooms, the back of the bus and wholesale voter disenfranchisement. Atlanta was smaller then and controlled by a few large business concerns, such as Coca-Cola and Rich’s. Those same businesses also were tied closely to the daily newspaper.
Allen says the city’s economic leaders weren’t telling AJC editors what stories to write, “but it was a fraternal atmosphere.”
Back then, “White people didn’t mind black people as long as they still controlled them,” says CL columnist Tom Houck, a one-time chauffeur for Martin Luther King Jr.
But in the 1960s, the number of blacks in the city crept ahead of the white population. As the balance shifted, the color of the skin of Atlanta mayors also changed. In 1973, voters elected Maynard Jackson as the city’s first black mayor. The business community, which for generations had easy access to the mayor’s office, began to see its power slip.
So strong was the tie between white businesses and city government that before Jackson’s administration, only .0012 percent of the contracts with the city went to black-owned companies, says Bob Holmes, a Clark Atlanta political scientist and state representative from Atlanta.
At the same time, the business community’s influence in the AJC newsroom was waning. The days when Coca-Cola patriarch Robert Woodruff could summon editors to spike or demand a story, or count on being introduced in a story (as he once was) as “Mr. Anonymous,” passed.
“Today, it’s very common for them to attack big business like they do individuals,” Sam Massell, the city’s last white mayor, says of the newspaper.
While the newspaper’s relationship with the business community was changing, so too was its coverage of black Atlanta. Before the 1960s, the paper largely ignored blacks unless it was to report on crime, says Ronald Bayor, a history professor at Georgia Tech and author of Race and the Shaping of 20th Century Atlanta.
The newspaper’s bent meant it could forget influence among black Atlantans, says Atlanta City Councilman Michael Bond. “When the AJC endorsed someone, you knew who not to vote for.”
Bond is the son of Julian Bond, a civil rights pioneer who was hounded by the media in 1987 amid allegations of drug use that came to light during a messy divorce. The junior Bond says he believes the attacks on his father — even so long after the civil rights movement began — were racially-motivated, that the AJC had it out for the elder Bond because “he challenged the paper.”
Allen says the paper also took heat for its lack of coverage of major civil rights confrontations just next door in Alabama.
Even Michael Lomax, not exactly a firebrand, says the paper has a racist past. In stories that hit newsstands in the 1970s, the former Fulton County Commission chairman’s name was followed by the word “black” in parentheses. Whites certainly weren’t defined that way.
Sniffing out the smoke-filled room
But a conspiracy today? Lomax, now president of Dillard University in New Orleans, calls that idea “a lot of bunk.” While the face of Atlanta’s business community still is predominantly white, it doesn’t speak with just one voice, he says. The days when only a few economic powers ruled Atlanta are gone.
The race vs. business issue in Atlanta today is “rife with twists and turns,” says Atlanta City Councilman Lee Morris, who is white. “My sense is that there isn’t a monolithic white business community. Maybe there once was.”
The power is too diffuse, the causes too disparate to support a conspiracy. And the leadership of Atlanta’s large corporations also is more itinerant than it once was, so CEOs don’t have a chance to become enmeshed in decades worth of city politics as they did in the days of mayors William Hartsfield or Ivan Allen.
While white businessmen still wield strong financial influence, there also is an ever-growing cadre of wealthy and influential black Atlantans.
Bayor expects the lines of race to blur in the coming decades. Where black once also meant poor, Atlanta’s political fights might increasingly be waged along class lines that largely ignore race. The Georgia Tech professor also sees white business leaders becoming more at ease with the idea of black political leadership. The business community is now acting more pragmatically, spreading campaign money around and no longer “waiting for the great white hope” for mayor, Bayor says.
At the same time, the AJC, still the city’s dominant news organ, has distanced itself from the business community and is a frequent target of abuse from the same interests it once was loath to criticize. The newsroom is also much more diverse than it was in the days of a majority-white city, too diverse to support any assertions of outside control, Lomax says.
So is there a conspiracy by Atlanta’s business elite to preserve its power at the expense of Atlanta’s poor blacks? The answer might be found in semantics. If you define a conspiracy as something out of the “X-Files,” then what’s happened in Atlanta doesn’t qualify. There is no grand plan, no secret meetings, no Cigarette-Smoking Man.
But if you define conspiracy as separate voices from the city’s white business community often heard singing the same tune, the answer is more complex. While corporations might not plot together, they often want the city’s money to be spent the same way and they share the same priorities, says Larry Keating, a professor at Georgia Tech and chairman of a city gentrification taskforce.
In a few recent high-profile cases, the business community acted to circumvent city authority — arguably at the expense of the black community. When Atlanta was preparing to host the Olympics, organizer Billy Payne pushed through Centennial Olympic Park without so much as a “by your leave” from then-Mayor Maynard Jackson’s office, Keating says. Payne outflanked the city and used state backing to push the park through in the city’s downtown.
“That was an enormous display of power,” Keating says. Jackson didn’t complain at the time — left out of a loop that included then-Gov. Zell Miller — but he’s since acknow-ledged the political slight.
Keating contends public spending related to the Olympics was controlled by Central Atlanta Progress and Atlanta’s Corporation for Olympic Development Authority (CODA), the public renewal and redevelopment companion to the private Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games. Ninety percent of CODA’s $72-million budget went to projects within walking distance of the Olympic Stadium, the Georgia Dome or Georgia Tech. There were housing projects undertaken with CODA’s help, like Greenlea Commons in Summerhill, and job training before the Olympics, but most of south Atlanta remained where it always has been: in the skyscrapers’ shadows.
And even after 30 years of black political rule in Atlanta, business interests — made up mostly of whites — still exert strong influence on the city’s funding priorities. South Atlanta is hardly better off than it was in 1970, Bayor contends, arguing that federal money has largely stayed north of I-20.
Corporate interests pressured black leaders to focus on renewing the city’s downtown, putting impoverished neighborhoods on the back burner. The federal money Mayor Andrew Young poured into Underground Atlanta is one example where the city dumped dollars into a downtown project rather than into the expanse of the long-neglected poor and middle-class predominantly black neighborhoods that stretch west, east and south from downtown.
“If you look at what black mayors have done for black communities, it’s not much,” Bayor says. “Black mayors have bought into the idea of the priority being downtown” and the connection between the city’s convention health and its overall economic health.
State Rep. Holmes takes issue with Bayor. Black mayors can’t be messiahs for black communities, he argues. Compare the city’s budget to that of Coca-Cola or Georgia Power. It’s minuscule, he says, and so it’s absurd that the influence a mayor would have in Atlanta would approach that of CEOs of the city’s major companies. That said, if the city had had five terms from white mayors instead of five terms of black mayors, the black community would not have the things it does, Holmes contends.
“People had never seen street sweepers on the black side of town until Maynard Jackson,” Holmes says.
And making downtown the priority has been the right path for the city, not a sign of Atlanta elected officials being co-opted, he says. Much of the job growth of the 1990s depended on the continued health of downtown, as well as the creation of jobs inside the perimeter that were accessible to poor Atlantans.
Capitalism, not conspiracy
Muhammad and Maynard Eaton, a veteran political columnist for The Atlanta Voice and The Atlanta Tribune, are unconvinced that a new colorblindness has made white businesses and the white-dominated media comfortable with black leaders wielding power on behalf of black constituents.
Muhammad says he can sometimes see the hidden hand of white business behind political news, but “I look at it on a case-by-case basis.”
To say a conspiracy of business interests never exists would be naive, Eaton argues, but to suggest it’s wide ranging and monolithic would be farcical. “On the one hand, it is a legitimate concern and a fear of a conspiracy of sorts; on the other hand, it’s political folly,” Eaton says.
Joe Beasley, southern regional director for the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, points to capitalism rather than to conspiracy.
“Money is what really talks, and it outweighs political power,” Beasley says. He argues that the perception of conspiracy is rooted in the perpetuation of white privilege, an unwillingness to spread the wealth to minorities.
While the AJC has made strides in its coverage of the black community, Beasley says poorer black communities still see white dominance in the coverage black political leaders get from the city’s major newspaper.
“There’s no question about that. There’s a double standard,” Beasley says.
At Mammy’s Kitchen, Petties discusses the perception matter-of-factly. “You hate to go that route and bring up the race card, but you’re almost forced to do it,” Petties says over lunch. A black politician is under fire, and you remember similar situations involving white politicians who were weren’t treated with the same media scrutiny, he continues. “They blow a situation out of proportion, and keep the negative going until all the positive is outweighed by negative. But what sells newspapers: positive or negative?”
Councilman Morris agrees that Campbell’s press has been negative, but adds that the mayor himself is largely to blame: “He chose not to talk to them.”
And the AJC’s Tucker says, “Every editorial page in every major city will criticize the mayor from time to time.” Few, though, including Atlanta’s two previous black mayors, have reacted the way Campbell has, she says.
Still, Eaton says, the AJC has lingering credibility problems among blacks. “They just don’t believe much of what they read. They are skeptical of the motivation of what might be behind a certain take on the news.”
White businessmen did business with the city with nothing more than a handshake for four or five decades. “When new people do it, they get upset and call it corruption when it’s just good ol’ clean political graft,” half-jokes Allen, who once wrote a political column for the AJC.
Meanwhile, positive news doesn’t get much coverage — a frequent rallying cry of the Campbell administration. For example, “Andrew Young built a great relationship with the business community, but it was never reported until he left office,” Muhammad says.
During his recent State of the City address, the mayor laid out his accomplishments — his legacy, as he sees it — including improvements in the city’s infrastructure, construction rates and public housing. But the headline in the next day’s AJC declared that Campbell would not let the federal investigation distract him from his duty with the city — hardly the focus of his speech.
Does that mean the mayor is being picked on by the newspaper because he’s black?
Not likely, says Lomax, who lost the 1993 election against Campbell. “We live in an age of intense media scrutiny. Just ask Bill and Hillary Clinton.” He adds that the white conspiracy theory is an easy rationalization but that other factors may be behind the tough treatment today’s city leaders get from the press and the public. “We live in an era when corruption in government is not tolerated. It was not always that way.”
In that light, Campbell’s — and Dorsey’s — allegations of unfair treatment look like just a time-honored political ploy. “Most wounded politicians run to their base,” Allen says.
And in the cases of Campbell and Dorsey, it’s a base that’s ready to listen.